104 Ahmet İçduygu
In the aftermath of the recession, the number of emigrants again in-
creased sharply. This was a period of mass emigration: more than 100,000
workers left Turkey annually. This was the period when the second stage
of the migration cycle began, the adjustment stage, in which emigration
continues and both the economy and the people start to adjust to its effects.
It is at this stage that the information and transaction costs are reduced
as a result of the improved information f low created by continued migra-
tion. This encourages family members to accompany initial migrants. The
characteristics of this stage are continuing labour migration combined
with family reunion, as well as an increase in the amount and signif icance
of remittances in the sending-country economy. Throughout this period,
which started in the late 1960s and drastically came to an end in the mid-
1970s, emigration increasingly turned into a family strategy in Turkey: family
reunif ication gained momentum rapidly. According to off icial records in
Turkey, a total of nearly 800,000 workers went to Europe through the TES
between 1961 and 1974 (İçduygu 1991, 2006). Of these workers, 649,000 (81
per cent) went to Germany, 56,000 (7 per cent) to France, 37,000 (5 per cent)
to Austria, 25,000 (3 per cent) to the Netherlands, and the remainder to
other countries.
3.2.2 Migratory f lows to Australia and the MENA region
In 1974, Western European governments stopped the entry of workers be-
cause of economic stagnation. Consequently, there was a dramatic decline
in the number of labour emigrants, dropping down to a total of just 17,000.
The year 1975 marked the end of large-scale Turkish labour migration to
Europe. It also marked the beginning of a new stage in the Turkish migra-
tion cycle: the consolidation stage. This stage involved a sharp decrease
in labour emigration, while family reunif ication and family migration
continued. It is important to note, however, that, in the Turkish case, it
was mostly the political initiative of the European governments which led
to this decrease, not the stabilisation of labour-market disparities. So this
date did not mark the end of emigration from Turkey, but the beginning of
a transitional period in which the direction of Turkish emigration either
shifted to other labour markets – Australia and the oil-exporting countries
of the Middle East and North Africa (see Table 3.2 and Figure 3.1) – or took
other forms, as mentioned above, such as family reunion, refugee movement
and clandestine labour migration (Böcker 1995; İçduygu 1996a).
In the late 1960s, while the doors of Europe were being closed to im-
migrant workers under the pressure of the unemployment problem, the